Alexei Kudrin is a former finance minister with a repute as an financial liberal in Moscow – Copyright CNS/AFP –
A longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Alexei Kudrin, stepped down as head of the nation’s audit chamber on Tuesday amid experiences that he’ll oversee the rebuilding of tech large Yandex after sanctions in Ukraine.
Kudrin, a former finance minister who has a repute as an financial liberal in Moscow, has been in Russian politics for the reason that Nineteen Nineties.
The 62-year-old mentioned he was “leaving the place of chairman of the Audit Workplace” after “about 25 years within the public sector”.
“Now I wish to deal with giant tasks which might be associated to the event of personal initiatives in a broad sense, however which on the similar time have an vital affect on folks”.
He has held the submit since 2018, appointed after Putin was re-elected to a fourth time period within the Kremlin.
Final week, Russian state information company TASS reported that Kudrin would play a number one position at Yandex earlier than the brand new yr.
“The choice has been made,” a supply instructed TASS.
Yandex, typically known as the “Russian Google”, has a search engine and in addition provides the principle taxi and meals supply service in Russia.
It’s registered within the Netherlands and has subsidiaries in Europe, the UK and the US, however most of its enterprise is in Russia and Russian-speaking nations.
Final week, its board mentioned it might assess “choices to restructure the group’s possession and governance in mild of the present geopolitical atmosphere”.
He mentioned this might embody creating a few of its companies, together with self-driving applied sciences, cloud computing and information tagging, “independently of Russia.”
He added that the corporate “anticipates” that “it can change its identify in the end.”
Yandex mentioned it might “switch possession and management of all different Yandex Group corporations,” together with promoting, e-commerce and meals supply.
This summer time Yandex mentioned it was promoting its search engine, the most important on the Russian-language Web, to the government-controlled VK Group, which owns the nation’s largest social community VKontakte.